Network Hard Drive Storage

[dkerfoot]

I use two Ximeta drives myself and have installed 4 or 5 of them for others. They are really nice, with a few qualifications:

If you have any older PCs (Pre-WinXP) or Macs, file sharing is greatly complicated. In these cases I recommend a different solution.

Support for new operating systems (Vista) can be slow to roll out. This caused me some problems when I added a Visa machine to my network.

http://www.unityelectronics.com/ often has great prices on Ximeta. Sometimes refurbs, sometimes new. A couple of the drives I have used have been refurbs - no issues, very pleased.

They currently have a 300GB for $129

[cgallery]

This looks like the unit to have . . . what are your thoughts?

http://www.ximeta.com/web/products/ndportable1_en.php

Loring, I like Iomega and that is my current 500gb external drive, but that unit does not seem to have any remote access capability. I need that option on a limited capacity. Also, this is actually for my business which has about 300gb of disk drive space occupied right now (thousands and thousands of photos, plus large pricing database files).

The XIMETA doesn't have remote access built-in, either. You'd have to enable remote-desktop on a Windows XP Pro machine that stays behind with the hard drive. Also, I have no experience RAIDING these drives, and if I wanted RAID I think I'd use a different solution (as mirroring over Ethernet is not the right approach).

[cgallery]

This looks like the unit to have . . . what are your thoughts?

http://www.ximeta.com/web/products/ndportable1_en.php

I could plug my current 500gb drive into the USB 2.0 opening on the Ximeta and do a manual backup of data each night. Probably, with enough effort I could automate that.

Oh, and I don't think that would work. You'd have to plug your USB IOMEGA into your PC and backup that way. The USB built into the XIMETA is only for connecting to a PC, not connecting other drives.

[gsmittle]

I've been real happy with my LaCie 500gig network drive. Easy to set up for my Macs, and my POS Winderz machine my school district makes me use can find it with just a little fiddling on my part. It's a little slow for editing video over the home network, but I have a separate FireWire drive for that.

It does work great with iTunes--that's where all of my music is stored nowadays. I back it up to DVDs periodically.

I haven't tried to access it over the Internet. I assume it's possible. Of course, we know what happens when we assume...

g.

[skipwill]

Another good way to access your files from anywhere on the internet is https://www.foldershare.com/...You dont need a static ip as foldershare takes care of everything. And its free from Microsoft<g>

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